Passive Optical Networks (PONs), such as Ethernet Passive Optical Networks (EPONs), are increasingly being deployed to satisfy the growth in residential and commercial demand for bandwidth intensive services, e.g. broadband internet access. An EPON generally consists of an optical line terminal (OLT) system in a central office and multiple optical network units (ONUs) in the field, that are all connected by a passive optical connection. The ONUs may couple customer equipment of one or more residential or commercial subscribers to the EPON, such that the subscribers may receive bandwidth intensive services, while the OLT equipment may provide flow classification, modification, and quality of service functions for the entire EPON.
In one or more instances, the OLT system may be coupled to a backplane or other uplink, such as through an Internet Service Provider (ISP). The ONUs may be associated with at least one 15-bit logical link identifier (LLID) that may be included in the data packets that are transmitted between the ONUs and the OLT system, such that, e.g., data traffic transmitted to/from the ONUs can be differentiated. The OLT system may require a number of resources to handle functions associated with the LLIDs, such as dynamic bandwidth allocation (DBA), scheduling, deep packet buffering, etc. In one or more OLT systems, switching functionality and OLT Medium Access Control (MAC) functionality may be provided in a single line card, or a single OLT device, e.g. an integrated circuit (IC), and may support data rates of up to 1 Gbit/s (1 G). In one or more implementations, the switching functionality of the OLT system may be provided by a network processor.